A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

f) “Mii imaa iniw ozidan, bakaan izhi-naagwadiniwan,” indig.
DP there those his/her feet different how they look he tells me
g) Oo, yay, gichi-zegiziyaan.
oh my I am really scared
a) ‘After awhile he took his pipe – it was long – and filled it.
b) That dog was sitting there.
c) He smoked and when got through smoking, the dog went out.
d) I was namesake to that old man.
e) “My namesake,” he said to me, “that wasn’t a dog that came in here,” he said.
f) “His feet were different,” he told me.
g) Oh, my, was I scared.’
In this story, a dog that was chasing the speaker, came into her house. An old man that
stayed with her family filled a pipe, smoked it, and the dog subsequently left. The old
man then tells the speaker that it was not a dog at all, because of its feet that were
different looking. In the middle of describing this event, in (56d) the speaker breaks the
flow of this description in order to provide a quick unrelated comment, accented by
idash, that she is the namesake to the old man. While unrelated to the flow of the story
and the eventline of the prior sentence, the use of idash appears to allow the speaker to
contextualize the following sentence in which the old man calls the speaker my
namesake.
Sometimes these digressions do not break with prior discourse in order to provide
background information or contextualization for upcoming discourse, as we have seen in
previous examples. Rather, the discourse marked by idash in such examples appears
only to represent elaborations of prior discourse. While still representing a break with
prior discourse, the use of idash in these situations only does so in order to allow
speakers to provide a brief detail regarding previous discourse. This is shown in the
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